Storing all that data can get complicated. The rise of cloud computing and virtualization has led to myriad options for data storage. Kevin Trachier did a great job of defining and highlighting the differences in various cloud storage options in his blog post, Which storage solution is best for your project?

Today, I’m excited to announce that we’ve expanded SoftLayer’s cloud storage portfolio to include two new storage products: block storage and file storage, both featuring Performance and Endurance options. These storage offerings allow you to create storage volumes or shares and connect them to your bare metal or virtual servers using either NFS or iSCSI connectivity.

The Endurance and Performance classes of both block storage and file storage feature:

Storage sizes to fit any application—from 20GB to 12TB

Highly available connectivity—redundant networking connections reduce risk and mitigate against unplanned events to provide business continuity

Allocated IOPS—meet any workload requirement through customizable levels of IOPS that are there when you need them

Concurrent Access—multiple hosts can simultaneously access both block and file volumes in support of advanced use cases such as clustered databases

The Endurance class of both block storage and file storage is available in three tiers, allowing you can choose the right balance of performance and cost for your needs:

0.25 IOPS per GB is designed for workloads with low I/O intensity. Example applications include storing mailboxes or departmental level file shares.

2 IOPS per GB is designed for most general purpose use. Example applications include hosting small databases backing Web applications or virtual machine disk images for a hypervisor.

4 IOPS per GB is designed for higher intensity workloads. Example applications include transactional and other performance-sensitive databases.

All Endurance tiers support snapshots and replication to remote data centers.

We designed the Performance class of both block storage and file storage to support high I/O applications like relational databases that require consistent levels of performance. Block volumes and file shares can be provisioned with up to 6,000 IOPS and 96MB/s of throughput.

Available sizes and IOPS combinations:

Block storage and file storage are available in SoftLayer data centers worldwide. SoftLayer customers can log in to the customer portal and start using them today.

In this interview, SoftLayer’s community development lead in Canada, Qasim Virjee, sits down with Marcus Daniels, the co-founder and CEO of HIGHLINE, a venture-backed accelerator based in Vancouver and Toronto.

QV: Y Combinator has become an assumed standard for accelerators by creating its own business model. What do you think is both good and bad about this?

MD: Y Combinator (YC) not only created a new model for funding tech startups, but it also evolved the whole category. Historically, I like to think that Bill Gross's Idealab represented accelerator/incubator 1.0 and YC evolved that to 2.0 over the past decade, resulting in a hit parade of meaningful startups that are changing the world.

The good is that YC has created a “high quality” bar and led the standardization of micro-seed investment docs for the betterment of the whole startup ecosystem. It proved the model and has helped hundreds of amazing founders with venture profile businesses that are changing the world.

The bad is that there are now thousands of accelerators/incubators globally running generic programs that don't help founders much. More than half have a horrible rate helping startups raise follow-on capital and almost all never had a single exit from a startup they invested in.

HIGHLINE has a strong track record in our short history and now sees a big opportunity to be amongst the leaders in the evolution of the accelerator industry.

QV: Many accelerators focus on streamlining a program to process cohorts of companies at regular intervals throughout the year, every year. Often, the high throughput these programs expect means they must select companies from applications, rather than the approach you seem to be taking. Can you explain how HIGHLINE is sourcing companies for investment?

MD: HIGHLINE gets over 800 applications a year and targets about 20–30 investments during that time. Out of our last 12 investments, all had either come from referral partners or the team hunting the best founders to be part of our portfolio. Over the years, we have moved from the ideation stage, which comprises the majority of inbound applications, to the MVP in market stage, which is our sweet spot now. We will also focus on low-volume, high-touch advisory support, which is why a lot of time is spent building relationships with founders and adding value to MVP-stage startups before investing helps curate better deals.

QV: Traditionally, investment vehicles (such as VC firms and accelerator programs) have been run by financial industry types, but it seems that you are taking a more entrepreneurial approach with HIGHLINE and constantly evolving your business model. What can you tell me about this?

MD: The best accelerator leaders globally are past entrepreneurs who have some investment experience given how hands-on you have to be with the companies. Without the experience of starting and growing ventures, it is really hard to help tech founders navigate the daily challenges. Also, the best founders get to choose, and they want to work with other top founders in a long-term mentor/advisory/coaching relationship.

QV: How does being “VC-backed” differentiate HIGHLINE from other accelerators?

MD: Having several VCs as investors, such as the BDC and Relay Ventures, gives us an edge in several ways. Firstly, they are not only a great quality referral network for deals, but also a huge help in getting our companies venture-ready—even if they may not invest directly. Secondly, they allow us to internally focus on a specialization in helping venture profile businesses raise follow-on capital, as opposed to the glut of programs that are optimized for entrepreneurial education and lifestyle job creation. Lastly, they put big pressure on the whole HIGHLINE team to both get results for shareholders and build something unique that can be a category leader over the next decade.

QV: Our country is physically large and this seems to have created differentiated tech startup scenes between its cities. How does HIGHLINE collapse the geographic divide by having a physical presence in both Vancouver and Toronto?

MD: HIGHLINE tries to curate and unite the best digital founders, institutional investors, and ecosystem partners across Canada. We position our offices in both Vancouver and Toronto as portfolio hubs for founders who want to be headquartered in Canada, but want to take on the world. Most importantly, we spend time in all major Canadian startup ecosystems and have plans for unique events to bring our curated community closer together.

In late 2014, I was at a Denver job fair promoting an event I was organizing, NewCo Boulder. All the usual suspects of the Colorado tech community were there; companies ranging in size from 50 to 500 employees. It's a challenge to stand out from the crowd when vying for the best talent in this competitive job market, so the companies had pop-up banners, posters, swag of every kind on the table, and swarms of teams clad in company t-shirts to talk to everyone who walked by.

Nestled amid the dizzying display of logos was MediaNest, a three-person, pre-funding startup in the Catalyst program, at the time they were in the Boomtown Boulder fall 2014 cohort. What the heck was a scrappy startup doing among the top Colorado tech companies? In a word: hiring.

MediaNest was there to hire for three roles: front end developer, back end developer, and sales representative. They were there to double the size of their team ... when they had the money. In the war for talent, they started early and were doing it right.

I've often heard VCs (venture capitalists) and highly successful startup CEOs say the primary roles for a startup CEO are to always keep money in the bank and butts in seats. Both take tremendous time and energy, and they go hand-in-hand. It takes months to close a funding round, and similarly, it takes months to fill roles with the right people. If you're just getting started with hiring once that money is in the bank, you're starting from a deficit, burning capital, and straining resources while you get the recruiting gears going.

The number one resource for startup hiring is personal networks. Start with your friends and acquaintances and let everyone know you're looking to fill specific roles, even as you're out raising the capital to pay them. As the round gets closer to closing, intensify your efforts and expand your reach.

But what happens if you find someone perfect before you’re ready to hire them? Julien Khaleghy, CEO of MediaNest, says, "It's a tricky question. We will tend to be generous on the equity portion and conservative on the salary portion. If a comfortable salary is a requirement for the person, we will lock them for our next round of funding."

MediaNest wasn’t funded when I saw them in Denver, and they weren’t ready to make offers, so why attend a job fair? Khaleghy adds, based on his experience as CEO, "It's actually a good thing to show a letter of intent to hire someone when you are raising money."

At that job fair in Denver, MediaNest, with its simple table and two of the co-founders present, was just as busy that day as the companies with a full complement of staff giving away every piece of imaginable swag. I recommend following their example and getting ahead of the hiring game.

As long as you're successful, you'll never stop hiring. So start today.

Building and deploying applications on SoftLayer with Bluemix, IBM’s Platform as a Service (PaaS), just got a whole lot more powerful. At IBM’s Interconnect, we announced a beta service for deploying OpenStack-based virtual servers within Bluemix. Obviously, the new service is exciting because it brings together the scalable, secure, high-performance infrastructure from SoftLayer with the open, standards-based cloud management platform of OpenStack. But making the new service available via Bluemix presents a particularly unique set of opportunities.

Now Bluemix developers can deploy OpenStack-based virtual servers on SoftLayer or their own private OpenStack cloud in a consistent, developer-friendly manner. Without changing your code, your configuration, or your deployment method, you can launch your application to a local OpenStack cloud on your premises, a private OpenStack cloud you have deployed on SoftLayer bare metal servers, or to SoftLayer virtual servers within Bluemix. For instance, you could instantly fire up a few OpenStack-based virtual servers on SoftLayer to test out your new application. After you have impressed your clients and fully tested everything, you could deploy that application to a local OpenStack cloud in your own data center ̶all from within Bluemix. With Bluemix providing the ability to deploy applications across cloud deployment models, developers can create an infrastructure configuration once and deploy consistently, regardless of the stage of their application development life cycle.

OpenStack-based virtual servers on SoftLayer enable you to manage all of your virtual servers through standard OpenStack APIs and user interfaces, and leverage the tooling, knowledge and process you or your organization have already built out. So the choice is yours: you may fully manage your virtual servers directly from within the Bluemix user interface or choose standard OpenStack interface options such as the Horizon management portal, the OpenStack API or the OpenStack command line interface. For clients who are looking for enterprise-class infrastructure as a service but also wish to avoid getting locked in a vendor’s proprietary interface, our new OpenStack standard access provides clients a new choice.

Providing OpenStack-based virtual servers is just one more (albeit major) step toward our goal of providing even more OpenStack integration with SoftLayer services. For clients looking for enterprise-class Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) available globally and accessible via standard OpenStack interfaces, OpenStack-based virtual servers on SoftLayer provide just what they are looking for.

The beta is open now for you to test deploying and running servers on the new SoftLayer OpenStack public cloud service through Bluemix. You can sign up for a Bluemix 30-day free trial.

Transforming an empty room into a fully operational data center in just three months: Some said it couldn’t be done, but we did it. In less than three months, actually.

Placing a small team on-site and turning an empty room into a data center is what SoftLayer refers to as a Go Live. Now, of course there is more to bringing a data center online than the just the transformation of an empty room. In the months leading up to the Go Live deployment, there are details to work out, contracts to sign, and the electrical fit out (EFO) of the room itself. During my time with SoftLayer I have been involved in building several of our data centers, or SoftLayer pods as we call them. Pods are designed to facilitate infrastructure scalability, and although they have evolved over the years as newer, faster equipment has become available, the original principles behind the design are still intact—so much so that a data center technician could travel to any SoftLayer data center in the world and start working without missing a beat. And the same holds true to building a pod from the ground up. This uniformity is what allows us to fast track the build out of a new SoftLayer pod. This is one of the reasons why the Sydney data center launch was such a success.

Rewind Three Months

When we landed in Sydney on December 11, 2014, we had an empty server room and about 125 pallets of gear and equipment that had been carefully packed and shipped by our inventory and logistics team. First order of business: breaking down the pallets, inspecting the equipment for any signs of damage and checking that we received everything needed for the build. It’s really quite impressive to know that everything from screwdrivers to our 25U routers to even earplugs had been logged and accounted for. When you are more than 8,500 miles away from your base of operations, it’s imperative that the Go Live team has everything it needs on hand from the start. Something seemingly inconsequential as not having the proper screws can lead to costly delays during the build. Once everything’s been checked off, the real fun begins.

Next we set up the internal equipment that powers the pod: four rows of equipment that encompass everything from networking gear to storage to the servers that run various internal systems. Racking the internal equipment is done according to pre-planned layouts and involves far too many cage nuts, the bane of every server build technician’s existence.

Once the internal rows are completed, it’s time to start focusing on the customer rows that will contain bare metal and virtual servers. Each customer rack contains a minimum of five switches—two for the private network, two for the public network, and one out-of-band management switch. Each row has two power strips and in the case of the Sydney data center, two electrical transfer switches at the bottom of the rack that provide true power redundancy by facilitating the transfer of power from one independent feed to another in the case of an outage. Network cables from the customer racks route back to the aggregate switch rack located at the center of each row.

Right around the time we start to wrap up the internal and customer rows, a team of network engineers arrive on-site to run the interconnects between the networking gear and the rest of the internal systems and to light up the fiber lines connecting our new pod to our internal network (as well as the rest of the world). This is a big day because not only do we finally get Wi-Fi up in the pod, but no longer are we isolated on an island. We are connected, and teams thousands of miles away can begin the process of remotely logging in to configure, deploy, and test systems. The networking team will start work on configuring the switches, load balancers, and firewalls for their specific purposes. The storage team will begin the process of bringing massive storage arrays online, and information systems will start work on deploying the systems that manage the automation each pod provides.

During this time, we start the process of onboarding the newest members of the team, the local Sydney techs, who in a few short months will be responsible for managing the data center independently. But before they fully take over, customer racks are prepped and are waiting to house the final piece of the puzzle: the servers. They arrive via truck day [check out DAL05 Pod 2 truck day]; Sydney’s was around the beginning of February. Given the amount of hardware we typically receive, truck days are an event unto themselves—more than 1,500 of the newest and fastest SuperMicro servers of various shapes and sizes that will serve as the bare metal and virtual servers for our customers. Through a combination of manpower and automation, these servers get unboxed, racked, checked in, and tested before they are sold to our customers.

Now departments involved in bringing the Sydney data center online wrap up and sign off. Then we go live.

Bringing a SoftLayer pod online and on time is a beautifully choreographed process and is one of my greatest professional accomplishments. The level of coordination and cohesion required to pull it off, not once, not twice but ten times all over the world in the last year alone can’t be overstated enough.

Last week, an estimated 21,000 IBMers, SLayers, customers and partners from around the world flooded Las Vegas, Nev. to attend the first-ever IBM InterConnect. This new conference combined three popular IBM conferences (Impact, Innovate and Pulse) into a single, premier cloud and mobile techno-topia.

What our engineers and developers did in Las Vegas after conference hours might have stayed in Las Vegas, but IBM’s InterConnect hits and announcements didn’t. Here’s a recap:

Speed to Market Wins the Cloud Computing Race
Everyone likes to go fast, and the new senior vice president for IBM Cloud, Robert LeBlanc, likes to go super-fast. “What I’m focusing on is speed,” LeBlanc says.

In this blink-and-the-market-changes world, time-to-market determines the winners and losers in cloud computing. Part of LeBlanc’s strategy is opening new SoftLayer datacenters. If you haven’t heard the news, SoftLayer will be launching Sydney and Montreal data centers in the next 30 days — with more coming soon. Stay tuned for more locations.

Cloudy skies on the horizon—that’s a good thing!
Our CEO, Ginni Rometty, announced a $4 billion investment on cloud services (shared with the data analytics and mobile businesses). She’s hoping that the investment will spur $40 billion a year in revenue come 2018.

In fact, hybrid was a big theme at InterConnect. “We are going to make all those clouds act like one,” says Angel Diaz, vice president of IBM cloud technologies. IBM cloud (powered by SoftLayer) will be a one-stop shop: a cloud superstore with a smorgasbord of aaS offerings.

It looks like it’ll be an exciting ride for IBM over the next couple of years. Make sure to keep up with the headlines for more announcements in the coming months.

Before modern-day shipping, packing and transporting different shaped boxes and other oddly shaped items from ships to trucks to warehouses was difficult, inefficient, and cumbersome. That was until the modern day shipping container was introduced to the industry. These containers could easily be stacked and organized onto a cargo ship then easily transferred to a truck where it would be sent on to its final destination. Solomon Hykes, Docker founder and CTO, likens the Docker to the modern-day shipping industry’s solution for shipping goods. Docker utilizes containerization for shipping software.

Docker, an open platform for distributed applications used by developers and system administrators, leverages standard Linux container technologies and some git-inspired image management technology. Users can create containers that have everything they need to run an application just like a virtual server but are much lighter to deploy and manage. Each container has all the binaries it needs including library and middleware, configuration, and activation process. The containers can be moved around [like containers on ships] and executed in any Docker-enabled server.

Container images are built and maintained using deltas, which can be used by several other images. Sharing reduces the overall size and allows for easy image storage in Docker registries [like containers on ships]. Any user with access to the registry can download the image and activate it on any server with a couple of commands. Some organizations have development teams that build the images, which are run by their operations teams.

Docker & SoftLayer

The lightweight containers can be used on both virtual servers and bare metal servers, making Docker a nice fit with a SoftLayer offering. You get all the flexibility of a re-imaged server without the downtime. You can create red-black deployments, and mix hourly and monthly servers, both virtual and bare metal.

While many people share images on the public Docker registry, security-minded organizations will want to create a private registry by leveraging SoftLayer object storage. You can create Docker images for a private registry that will store all its information with object storage. Registries are then easy to create and move to new hosts or between data centers.

Creating a Private Docker Registry on SoftLayer

Use the following information to create a private registry that stores data with SoftLayer object storage. [All the commands below were executed on an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual server on SoftLayer.]

Optional setup step: Change Docker backend storage AuFS

Docker has several options for an image storage backend. The default backend is DeviceMapper. The option was not very stable during the test, failing to start and export images. This step may not be necessary in your specific build depending on updates of the operating system or Docker itself. The solution was to move to Another Union File System (AuFS).

Install the following package to enable AuFS:apt-get install linux-image-extra-3.13.0-36-generic

Edit /etc/init/docker.conf, and add the following line or argument:DOCKER_OPTS="--storage-driver=aufs"

Step 1: Create image repo

Create the directory registry-os in a work directory.

Create a file named Dockerfile in the registry-os directory. It should contain the following code:

# start from a registry release known to work
FROM registry:0.7.3
# get the swift driver for the registry
RUN pip install docker-registry-driver-swift==0.0.1
# SoftLayer uses v1 auth and the sample config doesn't have an option # for it so inject one
RUN sed -i '91i\ swift_auth_version: _env:OS_AUTH_VERSION' /docker-registry/config/config_sample.yml

Execute the following command from the directory that contains the registry-os directory to build the registry container:docker build -t registry-swift:0.7.3 registry-os

Step 2: Start it with your object storage credential

The credentials and container on the object storage must be provided in order to start the registry image. The standard Docker way of doing this is to pass the credentials as environment variables.

You can ensure that it worked by inspecting the contents of the container in the object storage.

Step 4: Get image

The image can be downloaded once successfully pushed to object storage via the registry by issuing the following command:docker pull localhost:5000/registry-swift
Images can be downloaded from other servers by replacing localhost with the IP address to the registry server.

Final Considerations

The Docker container can be pushed throughout your infrastructure once you have created your private registry. Failure of the machine that contains the registry can be quickly mitigated by restarting the image on another node. To restart the image, make sure it’s on more than one node in the registry allowing you to leverage the SoftLayer platform and the high durability of object storage.

If you haven’t explored Docker, visit their site, and review the use cases.

In the world of big finance, before a company IPOs, the CEO along with an investment banker(s) go on a global roadshow to pitch their business to potential investors, including hedge funds, major investment funds, and other portfolio managers. The purpose is simple: Drum up sales of the forthcoming stock issue. In the startup world, there are no big investment banks scheduling meetings. However, there are opportunities to do a roadshow for your startup, which is even more important than the IPO.

There were 275 IPOs in 2014, the largest number since 2000. By contrast, there are around 500,000 new businesses founded in the U.S. each year (not all of which are tech startups), approximately 225,000 angel investors in the U.S., and as of a year ago, there were 874 venture capital firms [read more]. In big finance, a few companies compete for the attention of a small, accessible group of investors. In the startup world, a large number of companies must seek capital from a huge pool of often-hard-to-find, geographically dispersed investors. Because of this, a roadshow is even more important for startups than it is for IPOs.

The SoftLayer Catalyst team works with startups in communities as big as San Francisco’s Silicon Valley to as small as Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The number one thing entrepreneurs outside of the major financing hubs ask about is how to access capital. My response is always the same: Your job isn't to bring more capital to your local community; it's to build a great company. You know where the capital is, so build something worth investing in, and then do a roadshow.

Practice Locally

Thankfully, as the startup world grows & matures, the number of outlets for pitching increases every month. There are opportunities in most cities to stand up and pitch your idea to your peers or investors. Start by getting out in front of your local community as often as possible. In the Boulder/Denver community, there are a few companies that I see pitch all the time, and those companies have fantastic pitches because they are constantly practicing, getting feedback, and refining.

Look for meetups that focus on pitching such as 1 Million Cups and House of Genius, or simply do a search for startup pitch meetup in your city. During startup weeks or similar events, search and sign up for pitch practices and competitions. If your co-working space is like SoftLayer partner Galvanize, they might have a big member pitch competition or a peer-to-peer practice event. Participate in as many local and regional pitch competitions as you can find. As long as the competitions don't take a piece of equity or require a significant payment to participate—either of which should be very carefully evaluated beforehand—sign up, and compete. This constant exposure to your local market will help spread the word about your company, provide feedback on your pitch, and maybe even score some prizes!

Maximizing Your Startup Roadshow

Now that you've refined your pitch and practiced in front of as many local audiences as possible, it's time to start planning your roadshow. Traveling on a limited budget means you must plan a highly focused trip with a specific goal in mind. Maybe you're traveling from New York City to Philadelphia for a competition, or from Portland to San Francisco for an investor meeting; no matter the reason, it's imperative to maximize your trip. A good roadshow involves getting the absolute most out of your travel budget, and this means booking meetings with potential investors or customers.

For example, while attending StartSLC, I visited with a friend from Colorado, Ryan Angilly from Ramen. Angilly traveled to Salt Lake City to participate in the pitch competition, but he made the most out of his trip by filling his calendar with investor meetings throughout the week. Before his trip, he reached out to his contacts in the startup community in Utah and asked for introductions. After following through with the contacts, he met with investors he would have otherwise never met.

Start by either allocating a budget for travel or identifying the most important pitch competitions in your region or industry. Once you have your trip scheduled, immediately start looking for connections within your network. It's far more effective to say, "I'll be in town the 12th to the 14th; what does your schedule look like?" than a non-specific request such as, “When are you available?” Look for connections with ties to your local community as they are more likely to be helpful and make intros on your behalf. And ask around locally about who has ties to your destination. Get your meetings lined up, and get ready for a whirlwind of pitches on your first ever startup roadshow.

I'll leave you with this final point: In 2014, venture capital firms raised nearly $33 billion, a 62 percent increase over 2013 levels. They'll spend the next few years investing that money in startups. The money is out there, and you need to do a roadshow to find it.

The SoftLayer email delivery service is a highly scalable, cloud-based, email relay solution. In partnership with SendGrid, an email as a service provider, SoftLayer customers are able to create and deliver marketing or transactional emails via the customer portal or SendGrid APIs.

The SoftLayer email delivery service isn’t a full corporate email solution. It’s intended as a simplified method for delivering digital marketing (e.g., newsletters and coupons) and transactional content (e.g., order confirmation, shipping notice, and password reset) to customers.

Architecture

Traditionally, email is first sent through an outbound mail server that’s configured and maintained in-house, which is often costly and difficult to maintain.

With the SoftLayer email delivery service, the process is simplified; the only requirement is a connection to the Internet.

Package Comparison

The following table lists the service levels available to SoftLayer customers. The Free and Basic tiers are suitable for smaller applications with lower volume requirements. The Advanced and Enterprise levels are more suitable for larger applications and customers that require enhanced monitoring and other advanced features. Note that marketing emails are only available in the Advanced and Enterprise tiers.

Getting Started

Use the following steps to sign up for the SoftLayer email delivery service.

You’ll be taken to the Marketing Email Dashboard. Click the Create a Sender Address button.

Fill in the required information and click Save.

Navigate back to the Marketing Email Dashboard, and click the Create Recipient List button.

Enter a name for the list in the List Name field. Be sure that it’s something meaningful, such as Residential Customers.

You can either Upload a list of contact emails or Add recipients manually. When adding the recipients manually, you’ll be asked verify the addresses that you enter. Click the Save button when done entering addresses.

Navigate back to the Marketing Email Dashboard and click the Create Marketing Email button.

Enter the title of the email in the Marketing Email Title field. Under Pick a Sender Address, select either a list or select recipients for the email. Choose your content type and how to send the email. Split Test my Marketing Email, under Choose how to send your Marketing Email, is an advanced feature that lets you send different recipients different versions of the same email—sending the different versions helps determine which version is most effective.

Select the list of recipients to whom the email is to be sent and click Save.

Next, select the template for the email. Options include Basic, Design, and My Saved Templates.

Enter your email content. Make sure to provide a message subject.

Review your email, and select when you would like it sent—Send Now, based on a Schedule, or Save As Draft. Click Finish when you’re done, or Save & Exit for a draft.

You will then be brought back to the Marketing Email Dashboard where you can monitor the results of your email campaign.

Setting Up a Transactional Email

The following example shows how to integrate your app with SendGrid to send new users a welcome email. This example makes use of the SendGrid template engine, although it’s not required.

This year IBM is taking three amazing conferences and merging them into IBM InterConnect. With all the activity going on over the five days, the search for SoftLayer can be a serious undertaking. So spend more time enjoying the conference and less time flipping through your event guide. Here’s a rundown of everything you need to know to keep up with us.

SLayer Sessions at IBM InterConnect

SLayers are leading sessions all over InterConnect. We've cut out all the noise so it’s easy for you to slip our sessions into your conference agenda. What do you need to know? You’ll find it here.

dev@InterConnect

If you’re looking for developer-focused topics within IBM Interconnect, we’ve got you covered. dev@InterConnect is a developer’s two-day dreamland—from a slate of developer-focused sessions to firsthand training, and even a Developer Playground where you’ll get to play with some of the hottest tech toys. As an added bonus, you will find the Server Challenge there too. Try your hand at re-racking the servers and plugging in the cables—fastest time wins a MacBook Air.

End dev@InterConnect with a bang at the Gaming Bash we are sponsoring with Cloudant. Join us for bites, beverages, and be ready to game. Prizes and swag will be up for grabs; you just have to put your skills to the test.

IBM Cloud Experience Zone

If you find yourself with some free time at Mandalay Bay, swing into the Solution EXPO and make a b-line for the IBM Cloud Experience Zone. That’s where you’ll find your resource for all things SoftLayer. If you have questions about SoftLayer, our SLayers will be there to answer them. If you just want to see what we’re all about, we’ll be there running live demos.

Rock @ IBM InterConnect

After a packed conference, we hope you’ll be ready to rock! IBM InterConnect and Rocket are giving attendees a VIP worthy event with a performance from Aerosmith.

Go to the MGM Grand Garden Arena on Wednesday evening to party from 7:45–10:30pm. The event is included for InterConnect and dev@InterConnect attendees. Just don’t forget to bring your badge; it’s your ticket in!